The last few months have been an exciting rush of designing and building our recently released Android app—a brand new app, built from the ground up with the principles of material design. For our initial version, we designed a simple, clean UI with Genius’s bold brand colors.

That’s because the real showcase was our content—2 million song lyrics and millions more annotations from users and artists, full of rich content like quotes, in-line annotations, links, embedded videos, images, and (of course) GIFs. We knew this content needed to render quickly and seamlessly now, and in the future, no matter how it was displayed—in a separate pane, in a complex tablet layout, or interposed with other UI elements.

To accomplish this, we used a custom TextView and custom Spans, an object that stores appearance information about a String. Our video thumbnails, images, and GIFs are displayed by slicing this rich text and inserting it with ImageViews into a list.

I spoke at Droidcon NYC on August 28, 2015 about achieving the effects of professional print typography in Android’s native TextView, from essentials such as line spacing and custom typefaces to fully custom effects, using real-life examples from the code base of the Genius Android app.

We’re excited to announce that as of today, Genius is available as a Channel on IFTTT! IFTTT (If This Then That) — pronounced like “gift” without the “g” — is a tool for wiring together accounts and services. This builds on our existing developer API and continues expanding the ways you can get creative with Genius as a platform.

We’re starting off with two actions to take and two triggers to which you can respond.

The actions are following annotations on a web page or on a song with your Genius account. These make it easy to start hearing about annotations on things that matter to you.

For example, if you’re a SoundCloud user:

Or if you want to keep up with music that’s getting press instead:

The triggers are for new annotations created by you with Genius Beta on any web page or new annotations by anyone on a specific web page. These can be used in Recipes that respond to annotation activity from across the web.

Using Genius as a research tool?

Or maybe there’s a site you want to keep tabs on:

Want to let Genius control your lighting?

Okay, that one might just be for the extreme fans. But plenty of our other published Recipes can really expand your Genius experience.

Maybe what’s most exciting is that this integration multiplies the potential for apps built directly on our API. Now when your client creates new annotations, that can be linked up to trigger actions on other services.

So give it a try! We’re excited to see how you use IFTTT with Genius and what new Recipes you come up with.

At Genius we rise and shine driven by an ambitious mission: to annotate the world.

We’re powered by an incredibly insightful, funny, and passionate community annotating millions of texts both on our site and now elsewhere on the Internet, thanks to our new Genius Beta tool. Whether we’re debating a reference on the new A$AP Rocky album or annotating Shakespeare’s Hamlet line by line, the vibe of Genius is one of playful yet sharp collective exchange that feels like a conversation among friends.

It’s exactly in this spirit of collaboration that we make a big announcement:

We’ve released the first public Genius API.

We’re incredibly excited about this. There are four primary — and undeniably Genius — things you can do with the Genius API:

1. Create, Manage & View Annotations — Add, edit, and view annotations on any piece of text on the Internet, or on any song hosted on Genius.com.

4. Search Our Musical Metadata — Dive into Genius’s rich library of musical metadata about artists, albums, and tracks to help power interactive experiences through any connected app or service.

We’ve seen how easily Genius can be integrated with reading tools like Instapaper — which we’re proud to announce as an early release partner — in a smart and instantly shareable way. We truly can’t wait to interact with other platforms and apps… especially the ones that have yet to be created.

If you’re interested in integrating your app, site, or service with the new Genius API, sign up here for more information.